Amazon’s Impressively Successful Holiday?

Amazon shipped its annual press release Thursday with impressive-sounding facts touting the performance of its $79 membership-based service, Prime, over the holiday season.

How impressive? Unclear, because Amazon is rarely forthcoming with specific numbers. We’ve plucked a few:

It was a “record-setting holiday season for Prime.” Amazon doesn’t tell us how many people signed up throughout the season, or how many Prime members now exist. Amazon did say “more than a million” people around the world signed up in the third week of December.

Prime was so popular, Amazon said, that the company had to pull out a velvet rope, throttling new signups so existing customers weren’t unduly affected. Analysts at Baird put the number of Prime members somewhere north of 20 million world-wide.

On its peak shipping day for Prime, Amazon says, more Prime items were shipped world-wide “than ever before.” In the press release, CEO Jeff Bezos said there are tens of millions of Prime members world-wide, and he credited in part the Amazon’s “all you can eat” two-day shipping.

To that end, Amazon said its last Prime “one-day shipping” order that was delivered on time was placed Dec. 23 at 10:22 Pacific time, shipping to Carlsbad, Calif. Last year, the final successfully delivered one-day order was placed nearly a day earlier — Dec. 22 at 11:52 p.m. PT, shipping to Fayetteville, Ga.

Best. Season. Ever. The entire 2013 season was Amazon’s best ever, the company said. To illustrate that assertion, Amazon said more than 36.8 million items were ordered world-wide on Cyber Monday – a record-breaking 426 per second. Baird said the number was up 39% from the peak day a year ago. Here’s last year’s press release from Amazon, where the headline was all about customer satisfaction.

Mobile Gains. Amazon said more than half of its customers shopped using a mobile device this season.

Merry Kindle Christmas. “Millions” of Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fires were unwrapped. But no further specifics. Amazon historically hasn’t broken out Kindle numbers.

Mayday, Mayday: Amazon said the average response time for its live “mayday” help on the Kindle was 9 seconds, better than it had hoped for. No sense of how many calls were taken by Amy. Amazon scooped together some people’s reaction to the mayday button:

A young girl got a Kindle Fire HDX for Christmas. She was playing around with it and accidentally tapped the Mayday button—when she saw the Tech Advisor, she just screamed “MOOOOOOMMM!”, not having expected a person to pop up on the screen. Her parents could be heard laughing in the background.

Here’s the full holiday sales press release to find contextually difficult to assess numbers, and other genuinely interesting anecdotes from the selling season. (Here’s one: The most gifted Kindle book during the holiday season was “Sycamore Row” by John Grisham.)

Julie Law, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the company doesn’t disclose sales or dollar figures outside of earnings reports.